I am surprised about them dumping MagSafe, because it's a superior power option to USB-C. And it's also surprising that they didn't include at least one USB-A port for compatibility, but that's a minor issue in the grand scheme of things. The touch bar I am actually excited about for what it's worth. There's a lot of developers out there that still use the mouse for a lot of actions in their editor / IDE because they can't be bothered to learn the keyboard shortcuts. When those IDEs start to embrace the TouchBar it will make a lot of their lives easier by surfacing actions like stepping through a debugger, refactoring, etc.

So on the whole I really don't see that Apple is abandoning developers. I just look at what Microsoft is doing with the Surface line and I wish that Apple was investing more heavily in the same direction.

Off the top of my head:

Dell XPS 15 has up to 17 hours of battery life, a 4k screen (that can be upgraded to a touchscreen), dedicated Nvidia GPU and up to 32 gigs of Ram

The Razor Blade and perpetually on the horizon Razor Blade Pro have QHD or better touchscreens, 16 gigs or more of RAM, and the best line up of dedicated graphics cards you're going to find in a laptop. Oh, and they did reactive/programable touch keyboards without removing core functionality from the device. Can't find specs on battery life at the moment. Plus, mechanical keyboard and glowy lights!

And there's the ThinkPad line up which has basically everything under the sun now.

Not to mention the Surface Book, which claims 12 hours of battery life, meets your dedicated GPU and RAM needs, and has a killer scree, that supports a some rather interesting input devices. And it can connect to an iPhone 7 without a dongle.

There are options out there.

Every report I've seen from owners of the 15 says that even the 1080 version struggles to get 6 hours so where did you get 17 hours from?

I get about 8 hours on my 2 year old 15 rMBP with Safari. Less than 4 hours with Chrome.

[1] https://developer.apple.com/safari/technology-preview/

Between Chrome and Photoshop my GPU seems to be on pretty much all the time on my MBP. I get probably 5-6 hours on it working unplugged(my power cable is usually at my standing desk and some days I'm lazier than normal so I get close to this before standing up again).

I get close to 8 hours with a late 2013 MBPr 15".

I don't see any 32Gig update, either as standard (16GB) or even as a customization option.

http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/xps-15-9550-laptop/pd

As for the battery life, LaptopMag gives: 10:26 for the 1080p XPS 15 and a meagre 6:36 for the 4K screen.

I also think the SSD is quite slower, single thunderbolt port (it has 2 USB 3 ports and HDMI), and the touchpad is worse. So there's also that.

Also, dell battery life is only decent with the 1080p screen. Everything I heard about the higher resolution touch screen is that it eats battery life (and the 16 GB of RAM on the XPS 13 only comes with the touch screen).

Yes, the new MBP wasn't all we could have hoped for, but I had held out for a very long time and it's the best option I have.

EDIT: A actually do also have an XPS 15 w/Ubuntu, but that combination isn't quite a replacement for an MBP.

So am I a "pro" user? I make iPhone and web apps with lots of users that generate many millions of dollars per year, so I'm at least "prosumer", which is probably more in line with Apple's target market for MBP than someone who makes 3D games or does VFX or motion graphics, etc.

You just described my reaction to every single MBP thread I've seen since the announcement. Not only did I not want to participate in the drama, I have a feeling that a fair number of people who did will turn around and buy an MBP anyway. People are risk-averse and howl indiscriminately when things change. Let's hear about some real experiences of developers having problems using it, then it may be legitimate to revisit the issue

Otherwise, it looks like a solid upgrade. I don't need the battery life and would prefer to trade it for 32GB, but I understand why they made that decision.

Not to say that external monitor support in Linux, especially Ubuntu, is terrible: try using a 4k monitor along with a non-4k monitor. It will simply create so many issues that, in the end, you'll open your wallet and get a Macbook Pro. I've just bought a 2015 15-inch.

I know there is some overlap, but I'm shocked at how credulous HN seems to be in the face of the Internet Outrage Cycle.

Every newsworthy event generates a hoard of people that try to cultivate outrage to drive traffic to their site or to gain some recognition. A lot of this is natural, people aren't even cynical about it.

But it's useless to pay attention to it.

As someone who has been on MBP's for the last 7 years I recently jumped ship for 15" Dell XPS with Windows 10 and I am happy I did. However, that is because to me Win10 is now way more appealing than OSX. I hadn't updated OSX since Mavericks because there were exactly 0 new features that interested me. I don't have an iPhone/iPad/iEtc and I don't use the built-in OSX apps and it honestly seems like those two thing are all that Apple has cared about with OSX in recent years.

It wasn't easy to find a laptop with hardware that is acceptable coming from an MBP, it was a short list. But OS wise, Windows 10.1607 is, for me, way better than OSX at this point. IMO OSX feels dated, and toy-like compared to what Win10 has become. I was a heavy terminal user in OSX, like many dev's it was the *nix part of OSX that got me. But now with both the updated command prompt and WSL I don't miss the terminal, period. Also, Win10 virtual desktops already work better than OSX!

It's temporarily painful, but USB C seems like a tremendous improvement, and 4 full ports is mighty.

https://smile.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3...

Has anyone tested this scenario in real life? I'd imagine that if the machine is idle, 60W would at least provide break-even, and in sleep, should be able to charge it. But that's assuming that the identity negotiation works properly with this hardware combination.

Unless you've got all CPU and GPU cores blazing, and one or more devices quick-charging. And then it'll temporarily dip into the battery.

I havent used any of them so wouldnt feel comfortable recommending any individual model

The big problem would be with the voltage. But it looks like the USB-3.1 spec supports 20 volts (same as the 85W brick that comes with high end MBPs), and the mac power bricks only send 3-7V until they've had a handshake with the computer.

So it seems at least within the realm of physics that you could make a dongle about the size of the old magsafe-1 to magsafe-2 adapter...

Not gonna happen, iOS devices are Apple devices.

The best you can hope for is a short 1st party lightning to USB-C female, but this probably won't happen for a while as USB-C spec requires ANYTHING with a receptacle to talk to the thing on the other end.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/AUKEY-Adapter-MacBook-Google-OnePlus/...

Here is what you can say about USB-A: * Ubiquitous; it is literally everywhere on this planet * Extremely cheap, reliable and easy to use * Not actually a competitor to USB-C/TB3 * Does not prevent the inclusion of USB-C/TB3 * Does not present packaging or legacy support issues

USB-C/TB3 is a great technology and I wouldn't want to buy a system without at least one port, but it is NOT a replacement for USB-A yet. USB-A will continue to be the most prevalent peripheral connector for long after these new MBP's are retired.

I will add: USB-C/TB3 is not exactly easy to use at this point. The convenience of using that same port for both protocols (TB3 and USB3.1) is introducing confusion. Not every USB-C port/peripheral is also a TB3 port/peripheral, this includes adapters and dongles. Additionally, the power options of USB-C/TB3 add another wrinkle: what hubs/docks/devices can provide enough power to charge specific devices? Not to mention that the current crop of USB-C/TB3 accessories don't always 'just work'[1]. Hopefully this will get better, but again it is not going to displace USB-A for a long, long time.

[1] http://www.apple.com/ca/shop/reviews/MJ1K2AM/A/usb-c-digital...

...then you're the kind of person that has no problem plugging all of that stuff into a hub so that you only have one cable to connect.

It's a made-up problem with an easy solution that is arguably the only correct solution. If Apple put five ports on there, I suspect your imaginary scenario would then involve four displays.

If you want a hub, plug in a usb-c hub that provides power and it will power the laptop.

Do people even read about how things work before they make up crazy scenarios to justify their outrage?

It says use Thunderbolt, and you can daisy-chain a display. Thus, with 1 port you can connect two Thunderbolt displays.

It also says it doesn't support more than two displays in any case.

You have the option of "docking" a portable but you will never be able to conveniently lug along something like a desktop unless you carry some display device along with it.

I'm disappointed it won't be configurable with more than 16 GB of RAM but that appears to be an Intel issue (I know you can argue they could choose a different CPU, but it is a mobile device and low power CPUs make sense in that regard).

I would love to hear from Apple what their plan is for the Mac Pro, but I'm planning on buying a new MBP soon.

Doing Node development... Not such a big deal.

>I do occasional development on MacBook and 8GB is very OK.

What sort of development?

I spend basically all day doing Rails development, with MySQL, ElasticSearch, background job processing, etc. I'd be happier with 16gb, but tbh memory isn't the thing stalling my work (even with a lot of chrome tabs open) - it's usually waiting for my app to load to run some tests, or reloading my dev server.

I do some heavy data mining, but any problem that won't fit in RAM gets offloaded to a cluster on AWS.

The above open in desktops (Misson Windows). I do not do heavy data analysis. I never run low on memory with 16GB.

Performance is not a problem. I do open 1 VM form time to time and again no problem.

My pc at home has 8GB, I use mostly for games. It's more and more commonly not quite enough.

Xcode is currently using 4.15 GB of RAM (3.20 GB Compressed), its definitely my biggest memory hog. lldb-rpc-server is using 680.4 MB (387 MB Compressed), so that doesn't help with my memory usage.

I often watch for when my computer will start swapping so I can know to close some of the higher memory usage apps to reduce the swap death effect.

That's what I'm using right now. 16GB may be just about fine for this, but in a couple of years it would be nice to have 32GB just to be on the safe side..

That being said, I don't do microservices/many VMs/containers, etc.

Whether or not Apple produces a laptop with more than 16GB is up to them and what tradeoffs they make.

The author tested Xcode and ran "four production Objective-C projects, all cleaned and rebuilt."

> A couple apps you won’t see on this list are Chrome and Slack. Both of these applications have widespread reports of being memory pigs, and in my opinion you should boycott them until the developers learn how to write them to play nicer with memory.

I got my 2013 Macbook Pro with 16GB of RAM and I'm happy I did, it has aged well. Will a 2016 MBP age similarly well? I guess we'll find out.

Edit: The Dell can have the same CPU i7-6700HQ with 32GB RAM.

Engineering is about finding a balance among opposing constraints; Apple clearly decided that a svelter profile was more important than larger memory sizes for its market.

I'm pretty confident if Intel's CPU supported more RAM they would of made it a configurable option. Apple still has configurable graphics cards, hard disk sizes and CPU speeds. RAM could of easily been another configuration they could of offered.

Like I said previously, the MacBook Pro is a mobile device so making a trade off for power efficiency makes perfect sense to me.

My only point was that this really isn't something that Intel does or even should care about, it's the result of Apple's decisions; isn't even necessarily their "problem".

Also, if low-power, long battery life and low weight are not your requirements, maybe you're not in the market for a laptop?

recently researched dozens of Windows notebooks and I found two reasons why the new Macbooks might be still for developers:

- Only notebooks which can drive 2x 5k displays + the internal, there is no Windows notebook which can do this; and having two ultra sharp 27" 5k displays is something that might be attractive for developers

- the new MBP 15 is the lightest quad-core 15" machine by far, also not the worst thing

Maybe your developer archetype is too specific. #NotAllDevelopers

The number of people buying the much more expensive 5K monitors instead of the already great 4K monitors is rather small. That's why there are only three different 5K monitor models on the market.

I don't think I will be citing this as an example of "something to compete with apple"

I am personally appalled that 16GB could be considered too little memory for developer workloads (except for maybe some very specialised ones). While the Apple II with 48KB was a bit cramped, even an Amiga with 512k + 2MB RAMDisk was pretty decent, never mind the workstation-class NeXT cube with 16 or 32MB. (IIRC, developers at NeXT had 8MB machines, with compiles farmed out to servers, in order to "encourage" efficiency). I also developed significant Java server software on a 12" PowerBook G4.

Of course, the reality is that Xcode with clang/LLVM based tooling and its dictionary-based programming style sucks up RAM and CPU like you wouldn't believe, and various other decisions have been made in favour of recompiling/reindexing the world whenever possible. Swift takes that direction and dials it up to 11.

Anyone interested in more efficient dev tooling? Factor 10-100 improvements in performance are well within reach. Sub-second rebuild instead of minute+, MacBook/iPad plenty fast enough. etc.

It depends what you are developing. If I am debugging, I often have to spin up Unity, plus a crapton on 3D models and assets, plus the server which is a bunch of VMs, plus IntelliJ. This is in addition to Chrome and slack. It's okay on 16GB but I occasionally get issues and a couple of years from now this will likely get worse.

I'll probably buy a MacBook or MacBook Pro for my next laptop, unless something obviously better (including quality and support lifetime) is on the market, which right now it doesn't appear to be.

Losing Magsafe, 16GB top-out on the RAM are disappointing, but when I looked at alternatives nothing stood out as 'better'. I could get something much more powerful, but generally bigger and/or with worse battery. I've got a desktop for when I need nothing but horsepower. When I'm out working for clients I need something that fits in my bag on my bike.

I do python, clojure, haskell, rust dev on my mbpr using spacemacs and VSCode. I make heavy use of the escape key, and I'll probably miss that. On windows my capslock is both escape and ctrl depending on how I use it. On my mbpr it's just ctrl until karabiner catches up with the current OSX release.

I have 16GB right now. Photoshop makes use of it, but it's gratuitous use. It worked fine on my 8GB previous mbpr too. ZBrush does just fine with it. I'd have to look again, but I don't think I've ever come close to using all my ram without running VMs.

And with docker-for-mac maturing, I don't really run many VMs anymore.

I think all the people complaining about having to "look down" at their keyboard for the touchbar are full of it. There has to be something wrong with your eyes if you have to move your head to see it. It's about an 30mm away from the edge of the screen.

I personally think the issue is way overblown. 16GB RAM is far more of a concern for me. Logging in via TouchID would be a very nice feature.

And the question is why? I can only think the decisions behind the keyboard are to facilitate the goal of making the MacBook thinner and thinner, the point of diminishing returns on that was passed 2 years ago.

On top of that, I bought my MacBook pro in 2014 for £1200, to replace it today with the bottom 13" model would cost £1750. That's some price hike!

But! The butterfly keys are stiffer for smaller keys so ironically(?), the Fn keys and arrow keys are hard to find and press. I actually use the arrow keys so I find using the Ctrl shortcuts more often for moving the cursor around.

Just an opinion, but I do kind of wish that the new touch bar was at the bottom of the keyboard (with good palm rejection intelligence) instead. I'm not sure I'll transition to using it if it is a pain to reach. Being able to choose external keyboards with the touch bar at the top or bottom would be kind of nice.

One thing that I would have liked about having an SD slot was the potential to store 100-200GB iTunes library on silent, slow, inexpensive flash, rather than wasting space on the main fast but expensive drive. Even though a cheap SD card could be unreliable, the music would be backed up elsewhere, and changes within the last day aren't important.

I assume you are talking about Vim users. The escape key is the default. Be careful about assuming that "most people" change the defaults, that's almost never the case.

I went from MBA to MBPr for the better screen resolution and more than 8 GByte RAM which was a big problem running VMs with FPGA tools, but missed the size and low weight of the MBA. The new MBP without TouchBar is basically the machine I wanted when I switched to MBPr

When the MBP don't have the oomph to build a big FPGA, run huge simulations in reasonable time, build big SW systems etc, you need to use a server anyway. IMHO.

Show-stopper for me. I have no need to retrain my coding habits, there are plenty of computer companies that still happily provide the ESC key as they have for the last 30 years, so I'll just move to one of those computer brands.

Is your main gripe that the esc key is no longer a physical key? Or that learning a new placement of the esc key is difficult to adjust to?

But to your point, there are many ways I could workaround this change (changing key mappings, for example). But my point is; I don't have to. There are plenty of companies willing to sell me a computer with the same keyboard layout that's been standard for the last 30 years. I'll just buy one of those.

I see this no different than any other product I use on a daily basis; I would be resistant to change if it aversely affected my use. Luckily, I don't need to change my habits to conform to Apple's latest bravery. Apple needs to know this; they don't own their customers.

I would have liked one or more of

- an extra port (or included dongles)

- CUDA-ble graphics card (obviously mostly for testing)

- More RAM.

but I can live without all of those things for now....

Actually I bet that those that regularly attend WWDC, the actual developers that Apple cares about, don't care that much about the vocal minority.

I am a developer, XCode and all the other developer tools work perfectly fine for mac OS, iOS and tvOS applications.

Also for those workflows, targeting actual Apple customers that love the whole packaged experience of hardware + software, we hardly fill 8GB, let alone 16GB.

Maybe, and maybe not.

For example, I bumped into an issue with the older MBP where if you plug in a Universal Audio audio interface and a 4K monitor, the audio interface starts to hiccup. The 4K monitor moves too much data over Thunderbolt in a single transaction and so overruns the latency limits for the audio interface. I had to solve this by putting the 4K monitor on the HDMI.

So, what "end user type" is going to figure this out? Universal Audio somehow missed this--nobody doing audio driver development on 4K monitors, possibly--and likely couldn't do anything about it anyhow. Apple likely missed this because it's just a couple of people. Most end users just return the audio interface with a "doesn't work".

The fact that everybody missed this means that Microsoft now has a windows of opportunity in audio. They have a gigantic touchscreen with huge resolution. If they didn't mess up and they separated the interfaces, they have a clean run to displace Apple in the audio space for years.

These are the kind of things your developers run down. Piss them off at your peril.

Two things:

They were never "just for professionals" -- they were the "computer for the rest of us". Marketing wise at least.

They also were never about raw power. They were never the ultimate number crunching machines nor gaming laptops.

And the CEO of a company, executives, journalists, doctors, managers, etc -- people who don't need the latest Nvidia card or 32GB RAM -- are also professionals.

For videographers, musicians, illustrators, photographers, graphic designers, the MBPr 15" is one of the most popular, and well speced machines out there. Individual PC laptops can have this or that spec better, but rarely the all around package (weight, size, sturdiness, touchpad, screen quality, SSD speed, battery, etc) -- and in those rare cases, the price is very close.

I've worked in or with at least three of those. 8GB and integrated GPU is not going to cut it for a decent load on any of the basic apps.. Pro Tools will eat 8GB easily on a basic mix, Ableton will have you track freezing on and off all day. A lot of people in the audio industry went nuts when Apple stopped letting you add RAM because you could hardly have a serious production machine without maxing it out. After Effects, C4D, Blender, etc. will be rendering for a week straight (if at all). Photoshop will grind to a halt trying to work on anything of reasonably high res, especially with more than a few layers. Ever sat there watching a progress bar for a minute or two just to crop an image? That's what you're proposing as "well spec'd".

Your point about non creative professionals does hold water, though - that's the main audience IMO, the tech clueless types who are nevertheless obsessed with being involved with a "premium" brand. And yep, if you just want a couple spreadsheets, some social media, and maybe some reports, they're spec'd phenomenally for that kind of thing.

While 32GB would have been nice (especially for video) I've used NLEs professionally and DAWs semi-professionally for years, and it was already 4-5 years ago that DAWs could run almost everything you threw at them in a normal session. 100s of audio tracks and tons of effects. And we still have freeze etc. Tons of pro musicians still use 3-5 year old laptops or iMacs with 8GB or less just fine. Most pro studios don't even have latest or maxed out Macs (or PCs for that matter) unless the owner is technophile. And for stuff like notation, tracking, mastering etc (as opposed to mixing) cpu power / ram is not even needed.

>Photoshop will grind to a halt trying to work on anything of reasonably high res, especially with more than a few layers.

Where was that ever an issue and on what jobs? Pro designers did the most complex composites and layouts, for print media and billboards, 5 and 10 and 15 years ago. It's not like resolutions have gone up since then (the high dpi computer screens are nothing much compared to high quality large sized print jobs people did in Photoshop even 10 or 20 years ago).

Professionals complained about several lacking features in product that used to be designed for professionals. People need to recalibrate. A "Pro" label doesn't mean anything anymore.

> Apple doesn't have to listen to what the developers want--they don't need your business anymore.

I'd say they already got their money. Instead of repeat business, they're looking for new ppl to keep buying their products.

(This has been the MBP nickname de rigeur for a few years, but I'm too lazy to dig up the original source.)

http://m.quickmeme.com/img/4a/4a7f932881de8723c2f5ab516b69f8...

I want a desktop machine with modern GPU, at least 32gig ram. That I can upgrade if needed.

My hackintosh runs fine, but it is, well, a "hack"intosh.

And Apple should remember that their platform is very little with no third party developer.

The 17" MBP that had to have the logic board baked to reflow solder - took Apple 4 years to acknowledge that one.

My 15" 2013 MBPr whose battery swelled up to the point of breaking the touch pad.

New MBP announcement.

Looking forward to user upgrade-able gear for once.

These days, folks who don't want to pay for Win10 Enterprise and don't want telemetry will be choosing between macOS and Linux.

They are small demographic.

Also - that a 'new' laptop is outselling a highly fragmented group of other laptops for a few days is completely unsurprising.

Wait for 3 months, then compare laptop sales across the board - I don't think much will change.

In part, that was because of things like ios, where a mac was mandatory. In part it was because of things like Ruby which was simply much easier on a mac and in part it was because having a "real" unix shell is so damn useful.

Who's going to build all the iOS apps?

In a cafe right now, everyone here is on a Macbook Pro except the two government workers on identical Dells.